Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 69932
SAN disks detected before SCSI disks
Last modified: 2014-01-21 17:48:03 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; H010818; .NET CLR 1.0.3705) Description of problem: Boot behavior changed between RH 7.2 and RH 7.3, under 7.3 SAN disks attached to a QLogic 2200 are detected BEFORE localally attached disks (at least those connected to either an aacraid or aic7xxx controller). The 7.2 behavior seems "right", since it would be a rare situation where a SAN boot is preferable. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install RH while SAN is attached - SAN disk is listed as sda -- or -- 1.Install RH while SAN disconnected 2.Attach SAN 3.Boot fails when SAN disk is detected first and is assigned sda Actual Results: SAN disk is assigned /dev/sda, SCSI disks are assigned /dev/sdb+, causing a failure when disk detection routines complete Expected Results: Local disks should be mounted first in almost all cases. The error reported and the suggested solution (try passing init= to the kernel) would likely confuse a new user Additional info: I solved the problem by re-ordering /etc/modules.conf and building a new initrd while the SAN was unplugged. Problem experienced with a Dell 2450/Perc3/si and a VaLinux 2200; The RH 7.2 system was a Dell 4300/Perc2 (Quad Channel), which worked as expected (at least in regards to the boot process, see other reports)
the order is determined by /etc/modules.conf actually it lists the order of scsi host drivers there
You can change the order by installing with 'expert noprobe' and choosing your drivers in whatever order prefer. After install, you can change the order by reordering the "scsi_hostadapter" lines in /etc/modules.conf. Aside from that, the order is determined by the PCI bus scan order, which comes from the kernel.
My experience was that re-ordering the drivers in /etc/modules.conf was not sufficient. Once /etc/modules.conf was re-ordered, I had to generate a new initrd via mkinitrd /boot/initrd-24.18-3san.img 2.4.18-3smp; then modify /etc/lilo.conf to boot from this new ramdisk image (and run lilo, of course). Once this was done, devices were detected in the order I wished, and I could move back and forth from the two detect orders based on wether I selected the original RH configuration or my modified configuration. As for PCI detect order, the VaLinux boxes seemed to detect the QLogic adapter first, which would support the theory that the "installer" saw this item first, but the Dell 2450's detect the PERC card first, yet still "loaded" the qla2200 driver first. As for installing with the "expert noprobe" option, If I get a chance I'll play with this, (these two systems are in production now) but if the order can be corrected without such a workaround it ought to be. (I'm a pretty experienced Linux user now, and entering that mode made ME nervous, what about the typical admin)
I saw the same behavior on a dell PE2650 with internal disks attached to internal controller and external disks attached to additional adaptec 39160 in one of the pci slots. I'll try the suggested expert noprobe tomorrow and see if I can work around it.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/